Kendi “Self” in Turkish as a long-distance anaphor

Inglese

This thesis investigates the conditions governing the long-distance binding for two Turkish third-person singular anaphors: an uninflected reflexive pronoun, i.e., bare kendi (lit. ‘self’) ‘herself/himself’, and a modifier of a possessive-marked noun phrase, i.e., possessive kendi (lit. ‘self”s) ‘his/her own’. We investigated the behavior of the bare and possessive forms in non-local contexts according to the framework of Giorgi’s (2006, 2007) theory on long-distance anaphors. This thesis primarily drew data from the Turkish National Corpus (Aksan et al. 2012), focusing on a sample of 98 instances that did not conform to the locality condition of the Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981). The data analysis revealed three categories based on the antecedent's position: sub-command, sentence-internal, and sentence-external. Most sub-command cases were observed when no potential binder existed within the minimal clause. In sentence-internal cases, the attitude holder, identified by means of the tests proposed by Charnavel and Zlogar (2015), appeared to play a crucial role in long-distance binding, confirming our hypothesis. However, contrary to our initial assumption, the results also show that both bare kendi and possessive kendi can be used in sentence-external cases. Sentence-external cases appeared in Free Indirect Speech or in contexts where empathy focus plays a role. However, bare kendi seems to be more restricted in licensing an antecedent in contexts of empathy loci compared to the inflected form kendisi (self-3SG.POSS) ‘herself/himself’ and possessive kendi. We propose that bare kendi falls in the category of forms that are that are “primarily” bound-anaphor reflexives but can be used non-locally in specific syntactic and discourse contexts, according to the classification of Charnavel et. al. (2017).